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Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and is key to the success of Transformers. However, the iterative application of attention across layers induces complex dynamics that remain to be fully understood. To analyze these dynamics, we identify each input sequence with a probability measure and model its evolution as a Vlasov equation called Transformer PDE, whose velocity field is non-linear in the probability measure. Our first set of contributions focuses on compactly supported initial data. We show the Transformer PDE is well-posed and is the mean-field limit of an interacting particle system, thus generalizing and extending previous analysis to several variants of self-attention: multi-head attention, L2 attention, Sinkhorn attention, Sigmoid attention, and masked attention--leveraging a conditional Wasserstein framework. In a second set of contributions, we are the first to study non-compactly supported initial conditions, by focusing on Gaussian initial data. Again for different types of attention, we show that the Transformer PDE preserves the space of Gaussian measures, which allows us to analyze the Gaussian case theoretically and numerically to identify typical behaviors. This Gaussian analysis captures the evolution of data anisotropy through a deep Transformer. In particular, we highlight a clustering phenomenon that parallels previous results in the non-normalized discrete case.

This overview article highlights the critical role of mathematics in artificial intelligence (AI), emphasizing that mathematics provides tools to better understand and enhance AI systems. Conversely, AI raises new problems and drives the development of new mathematics at the intersection of various fields. This article focuses on the application of analytical and probabilistic tools to model neural network architectures and better understand their optimization. Statistical questions (particularly the generalization capacity of these networks) are intentionally set aside, though they are of crucial importance. We also shed light on the evolution of ideas that have enabled significant advances in AI through architectures tailored to specific tasks, each echoing distinct mathematical techniques. The goal is to encourage more mathematicians to take an interest in and contribute to this exciting field.

Causal Transformers are trained to predict the next token for a given context. While it is widely accepted that self-attention is crucial for encoding the causal structure of sequences, the precise underlying mechanism behind this in-context autoregressive learning ability remains unclear. In this paper, we take a step towards understanding this phenomenon by studying the approximation ability of Transformers for next-token prediction. Specifically, we explore the capacity of causal Transformers to predict the next token $x_{t+1}$ given an autoregressive sequence $(x_1, \dots, x_t)$ as a prompt, where $ x_{t+1} = f(x_t) $, and $ f $ is a context-dependent function that varies with each sequence. On the theoretical side, we focus on specific instances, namely when $ f $ is linear or when $ (x_t)_{t \geq 1} $ is periodic. We explicitly construct a Transformer (with linear, exponential, or softmax attention) that learns the mapping $f$ in-context through a causal kernel descent method. The causal kernel descent method we propose provably estimates $x_{t+1} $ based solely on past and current observations $ (x_1, \dots, x_t) $, with connections to the Kaczmarz algorithm in Hilbert spaces. We present experimental results that validate our theoretical findings and suggest their applicability to more general mappings $f$., Comment: Preprint, 22 pages

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we study in particular the ability of these architectures to handle an arbitrarily large number of context tokens. To mathematically, uniformly address their expressivity, we consider the case that the mappings are conditioned on a context represented by a probability distribution of tokens which becomes discrete for a finite number of these. The relevant notion of smoothness then corresponds to continuity in terms of the Wasserstein distance between these contexts. We demonstrate that deep transformers are universal and can approximate continuous in-context mappings to arbitrary precision, uniformly over compact token domains. A key aspect of our results, compared to existing findings, is that for a fixed precision, a single transformer can operate on an arbitrary (even infinite) number of tokens. Additionally, it operates with a fixed embedding dimension of tokens (this dimension does not increase with precision) and a fixed number of heads (proportional to the dimension). The use of MLPs between multi-head attention layers is also explicitly controlled. We consider both unmasked attentions (as used for the vision transformer) and masked causal attentions (as used for NLP and time series applications). We tackle the causal setting leveraging a space-time lifting to analyze causal attention as a mapping over probability distributions of tokens., Comment: 25 pages

Conservation laws are well-established in the context of Euclidean gradient flow dynamics, notably for linear or ReLU neural network training. Yet, their existence and principles for non-Euclidean geometries and momentum-based dynamics remain largely unknown. In this paper, we characterize "all" conservation laws in this general setting. In stark contrast to the case of gradient flows, we prove that the conservation laws for momentum-based dynamics exhibit temporal dependence. Additionally, we often observe a "conservation loss" when transitioning from gradient flow to momentum dynamics. Specifically, for linear networks, our framework allows us to identify all momentum conservation laws, which are less numerous than in the gradient flow case except in sufficiently over-parameterized regimes. With ReLU networks, no conservation law remains. This phenomenon also manifests in non-Euclidean metrics, used e.g. for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF): all conservation laws can be determined in the gradient flow context, yet none persists in the momentum case., Comment: Accepted to ICML 2024

We study the convergence of gradient flow for the training of deep neural networks. If Residual Neural Networks are a popular example of very deep architectures, their training constitutes a challenging optimization problem due notably to the non-convexity and the non-coercivity of the objective. Yet, in applications, those tasks are successfully solved by simple optimization algorithms such as gradient descent. To better understand this phenomenon, we focus here on a ``mean-field'' model of infinitely deep and arbitrarily wide ResNet, parameterized by probability measures over the product set of layers and parameters and with constant marginal on the set of layers. Indeed, in the case of shallow neural networks, mean field models have proven to benefit from simplified loss-landscapes and good theoretical guarantees when trained with gradient flow for the Wasserstein metric on the set of probability measures. Motivated by this approach, we propose to train our model with gradient flow w.r.t. the conditional Optimal Transport distance: a restriction of the classical Wasserstein distance which enforces our marginal condition. Relying on the theory of gradient flows in metric spaces we first show the well-posedness of the gradient flow equation and its consistency with the training of ResNets at finite width. Performing a local Polyak-\L{}ojasiewicz analysis, we then show convergence of the gradient flow for well-chosen initializations: if the number of features is finite but sufficiently large and the risk is sufficiently small at initialization, the gradient flow converges towards a global minimizer. This is the first result of this type for infinitely deep and arbitrarily wide ResNets.

Bilevel optimization aims to optimize an outer objective function that depends on the solution to an inner optimization problem. It is routinely used in Machine Learning, notably for hyperparameter tuning. The conventional method to compute the so-called hypergradient of the outer problem is to use the Implicit Function Theorem (IFT). As a function of the error of the inner problem resolution, we study the error of the IFT method. We analyze two strategies to reduce this error: preconditioning the IFT formula and reparameterizing the inner problem. We give a detailed account of the impact of these two modifications on the error, highlighting the role played by higher-order derivatives of the functionals at stake. Our theoretical findings explain when super efficiency, namely reaching an error on the hypergradient that depends quadratically on the error on the inner problem, is achievable and compare the two approaches when this is impossible. Numerical evaluations on hyperparameter tuning for regression problems substantiate our theoretical findings., Comment: Accepted in AISTATS 2024

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a simple next token prediction task, where sequences are generated as a first-order autoregressive process $s_{t+1} = W s_t$. We show how a trained Transformer predicts the next token by first learning $W$ in-context, then applying a prediction mapping. We call the resulting procedure in-context autoregressive learning. More precisely, focusing on commuting orthogonal matrices $W$, we first show that a trained one-layer linear Transformer implements one step of gradient descent for the minimization of an inner objective function, when considering augmented tokens. When the tokens are not augmented, we characterize the global minima of a one-layer diagonal linear multi-head Transformer. Importantly, we exhibit orthogonality between heads and show that positional encoding captures trigonometric relations in the data. On the experimental side, we consider the general case of non-commuting orthogonal matrices and generalize our theoretical findings., Comment: 20 pages ICML 2024

Self-attention and masked self-attention are at the heart of Transformers' outstanding success. Still, our mathematical understanding of attention, in particular of its Lipschitz properties - which are key when it comes to analyzing robustness and expressive power - is incomplete. We provide a detailed study of the Lipschitz constant of self-attention in several practical scenarios, discussing the impact of the sequence length $n$ and layer normalization on the local Lipschitz constant of both unmasked and masked self-attention. In particular, we show that for inputs of length $n$ in any compact set, the Lipschitz constant of self-attention is bounded by $\sqrt{n}$ up to a constant factor and that this bound is tight for reasonable sequence lengths. When the sequence length $n$ is too large for the previous bound to be tight, which we refer to as the mean-field regime, we provide an upper bound and a matching lower bound which are independent of $n$. Our mean-field framework for masked self-attention is novel and of independent interest. Our experiments on pretrained and randomly initialized BERT and GPT-2 support our theoretical findings., Comment: Accepted at ICML 2024

Super-resolution of pointwise sources is of utmost importance in various areas of imaging sciences. Specific instances of this problem arise in single molecule fluorescence, spike sorting in neuroscience, astrophysical imaging, radar imaging, and nuclear resonance imaging. In all these applications, the Lasso method (also known as Basis Pursuit or \( \ell^1 \)-regularization) is the de facto baseline method for recovering sparse vectors from low-resolution measurements. This approach requires discretization of the domain, which leads to quantization artifacts and consequently, an overestimation of the number of sources. While grid-less methods, such as Prony-type methods or non-convex optimization over the source position, can mitigate this, the Lasso remains a strong baseline due to its versatility and simplicity. In this work, we introduce a simple extension of the Lasso, termed ``super-resolved Lasso" (SR-Lasso). Inspired by the Continuous Basis Pursuit (C-BP) method, our approach introduces an extra parameter to account for the shift of the sources between grid locations. Our method is more comprehensive than C-BP, accommodating both arbitrary real-valued or complex-valued sources. Furthermore, it can be solved similarly to the Lasso as it boils down to solving a group-Lasso problem. A notable advantage of SR-Lasso is its theoretical properties, akin to grid-less methods. Given a separation condition on the sources and a restriction on the shift magnitude outside the grid, SR-Lasso precisely estimates the correct number of sources.

Matching a source to a target probability measure is often solved by instantiating a linear optimal transport (OT) problem, parameterized by a ground cost function that quantifies discrepancy between points. When these measures live in the same metric space, the ground cost often defaults to its distance. When instantiated across two different spaces, however, choosing that cost in the absence of aligned data is a conundrum. As a result, practitioners often resort to solving instead a quadratic Gromow-Wasserstein (GW) problem. We exploit in this work a parallel between GW and cost-regularized OT, the regularized minimization of a linear OT objective parameterized by a ground cost. We use this cost-regularized formulation to match measures across two different Euclidean spaces, where the cost is evaluated between transformed source points and target points. We show that several quadratic OT problems fall in this category, and consider enforcing structure in linear transform (e.g. sparsity), by introducing structure-inducing regularizers. We provide a proximal algorithm to extract such transforms from unaligned data, and demonstrate its applicability to single-cell spatial transcriptomics/multiomics matching tasks.

Optimal Transport is a useful metric to compare probability distributions and to compute a pairing given a ground cost. Its entropic regularization variant (eOT) is crucial to have fast algorithms and reflect fuzzy/noisy matchings. This work focuses on Inverse Optimal Transport (iOT), the problem of inferring the ground cost from samples drawn from a coupling that solves an eOT problem. It is a relevant problem that can be used to infer unobserved/missing links, and to obtain meaningful information about the structure of the ground cost yielding the pairing. On one side, iOT benefits from convexity, but on the other side, being ill-posed, it requires regularization to handle the sampling noise. This work presents an in-depth theoretical study of the l1 regularization to model for instance Euclidean costs with sparse interactions between features. Specifically, we derive a sufficient condition for the robust recovery of the sparsity of the ground cost that can be seen as a far reaching generalization of the Lasso's celebrated Irrepresentability Condition. To provide additional insight into this condition, we work out in detail the Gaussian case. We show that as the entropic penalty varies, the iOT problem interpolates between a graphical Lasso and a classical Lasso, thereby establishing a connection between iOT and graph estimation, an important problem in ML.

Understanding the geometric properties of gradient descent dynamics is a key ingredient in deciphering the recent success of very large machine learning models. A striking observation is that trained over-parameterized models retain some properties of the optimization initialization. This "implicit bias" is believed to be responsible for some favorable properties of the trained models and could explain their good generalization properties. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, we rigorously expose the definition and basic properties of "conservation laws", that define quantities conserved during gradient flows of a given model (e.g. of a ReLU network with a given architecture) with any training data and any loss. Then we explain how to find the maximal number of independent conservation laws by performing finite-dimensional algebraic manipulations on the Lie algebra generated by the Jacobian of the model. Finally, we provide algorithms to: a) compute a family of polynomial laws; b) compute the maximal number of (not necessarily polynomial) independent conservation laws. We provide showcase examples that we fully work out theoretically. Besides, applying the two algorithms confirms for a number of ReLU network architectures that all known laws are recovered by the algorithm, and that there are no other independent laws. Such computational tools pave the way to understanding desirable properties of optimization initialization in large machine learning models.

Implicit deep learning has recently gained popularity with applications ranging from meta-learning to Deep Equilibrium Networks (DEQs). In its general formulation, it relies on expressing some components of deep learning pipelines implicitly, typically via a root equation called the inner problem. In practice, the solution of the inner problem is approximated during training with an iterative procedure, usually with a fixed number of inner iterations. During inference, the inner problem needs to be solved with new data. A popular belief is that increasing the number of inner iterations compared to the one used during training yields better performance. In this paper, we question such an assumption and provide a detailed theoretical analysis in a simple setting. We demonstrate that overparametrization plays a key role: increasing the number of iterations at test time cannot improve performance for overparametrized networks. We validate our theory on an array of implicit deep-learning problems. DEQs, which are typically overparametrized, do not benefit from increasing the number of iterations at inference while meta-learning, which is typically not overparametrized, benefits from it.

The top-k operator returns a sparse vector, where the non-zero values correspond to the k largest values of the input. Unfortunately, because it is a discontinuous function, it is difficult to incorporate in neural networks trained end-to-end with backpropagation. Recent works have considered differentiable relaxations, based either on regularization or perturbation techniques. However, to date, no approach is fully differentiable and sparse. In this paper, we propose new differentiable and sparse top-k operators. We view the top-k operator as a linear program over the permutahedron, the convex hull of permutations. We then introduce a p-norm regularization term to smooth out the operator, and show that its computation can be reduced to isotonic optimization. Our framework is significantly more general than the existing one and allows for example to express top-k operators that select values in magnitude. On the algorithmic side, in addition to pool adjacent violator (PAV) algorithms, we propose a new GPU/TPU-friendly Dykstra algorithm to solve isotonic optimization problems. We successfully use our operators to prune weights in neural networks, to fine-tune vision transformers, and as a router in sparse mixture of experts., Comment: ICML 2023 18 pages

In the insurance industry detecting fraudulent claims is a critical task with a significant financial impact. A common strategy to identify fraudulent claims is looking for inconsistencies in the supporting evidence. However, this is a laborious and cognitively heavy task for human experts as insurance claims typically come with a plethora of data from different modalities (e.g. images, text and metadata). To overcome this challenge, the research community has focused on multimodal machine learning frameworks that can efficiently reason through multiple data sources. Despite recent advances in multimodal learning, these frameworks still suffer from (i) challenges of joint-training caused by the different characteristics of different modalities and (ii) overfitting tendencies due to high model complexity. In this work, we address these challenges by introducing a multimodal reasoning framework, AutoFraudNet (Automobile Insurance Fraud Detection Network), for detecting fraudulent auto-insurance claims. AutoFraudNet utilizes a cascaded slow fusion framework and state-of-the-art fusion block, BLOCK Tucker, to alleviate the challenges of joint-training. Furthermore, it incorporates a light-weight architectural design along with additional losses to prevent overfitting. Through extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset, we demonstrate: (i) the merits of multimodal approaches, when compared to unimodal and bimodal methods, and (ii) the effectiveness of AutoFraudNet in fusing various modalities to boost performance (over 3\% in PR AUC)., Comment: Published at The AAAI-2023 Workshop On Multimodal AI For Financial Forecasting

Optimal Transport (OT) has recently emerged as a central tool in data sciences to compare in a geometrically faithful way point clouds and more generally probability distributions. The wide adoption of OT into existing data analysis and machine learning pipelines is however plagued by several shortcomings. This includes its lack of robustness to outliers, its high computational costs, the need for a large number of samples in high dimension and the difficulty to handle data in distinct spaces. In this review, we detail several recently proposed approaches to mitigate these issues. We insist in particular on unbalanced OT, which compares arbitrary positive measures, not restricted to probability distributions (i.e. their total mass can vary). This generalization of OT makes it robust to outliers and missing data. The second workhorse of modern computational OT is entropic regularization, which leads to scalable algorithms while lowering the sample complexity in high dimension. The last point presented in this review is the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance, which extends OT to cope with distributions belonging to different metric spaces. The main motivation for this review is to explain how unbalanced OT, entropic regularization and GW can work hand-in-hand to turn OT into efficient geometric loss functions for data sciences.